Reinventing the Reels: Considering the Implications and Possibilities in the Rivettian Make-Over Edit

One of the countless things I admire about my favorite filmmaker and personal creative hero Jacques Rivette is his insight for recognizing and actively realizing the breadth, depth and fullness of expression in the artistic process and the filmmaking craft.  This, to me, is illustrated perhaps most in the fact that Rivette has, on his own volition, recut, overhauled and completely made over certain films of his own, as a thoughtful meditation and reconsideration of the material itself.  This is truly extraordinary, in that literally no other filmmaker on the international scene does such a thing.  This practice, however, is not to be confused with directors presenting a director’s cut and/or an extended version years after a film’s initial release.  This is reinvention.  We are talking about an artist totally rethinking the work at its core, and reconsidering its essence.  We are talking about re-focusing a project’s ambitions — watching it walk back over itself.

In 1974, Rivette recut and reinvented his Out 1 into the retitled Out 1: Spectre.  In 1981, he reshaped his feature film La pont du nord into a short film called Paris s'en va.  In 1991, he recut his La belle noiseuse into the retitled Divertimento.  These are six completely different films culled from the same wells of footage.  There are select isolated incidents in cinema history when material is used over again in only slightly reinvented versions, but no one seems to think as deeply about the ramifications of this as Rivette does.   One such example is Alain Robbe-Grillet, who helmed N. a pris les dés (1971) using footage from his previous year’s Eden and After (1970).  Robbe-Grillet later did the same in literature, reworking his early novel Le reprise into a late-career novel called Les gommes. In the music world, the late musician Arthur Russell conceived many of his most haunting cello/vocal songs using worked-over riffs, repeated, sharpened then softened again with a shuffling of moods and audio motifs. Russell meditates on these elements, in some sense reinventing them in succession over the course of entire albums.  Filmmaker Alain Resnais also toyed with a similar notion of meta-reinvention with his 1993 diptych Smoking/No Smoking.

Sure, needless to say, there are plenty of horror stories about any number of outside hands wrecking and emasculating films and, yes, I include studio heads and overzealous producers in the “outside hands” category.  But a director himself beginning again from scratch after having completed a cut he has approved for release to the public, and then releasing yet a second film for the public to consider is unique and exhilaratingly novel.  It’s a patently original process, demonstrating great care, respect and excitement for the form, as no other filmmaker in my perspective possibly could demonstrate it, at least to such an extent.

Time Out London critic and film scholar Jonathan Romney writes of Divertimento, “Rivette here remodels La belle noiseuse into another film entirely, using alternative takes, recutting to a much brisker rhythm, and bookending it with a discretely but crucially different beginning and ending.  The film makes more of a mystery out of the artist-model relationship; the emphasis now shifts radically onto the artist’s wife, who now witnesses the proceedings from outside, much as we do.  It’s a lighter film, but by no means slighter; it’s more like the difference between a Henry James short story and an extended performance piece.”  Romney also writes that Out 1: Spectre is “not so much a digest of Rivette’s legendary original Out 1 as a ghost and a reworking of some of the same material (‘a critique,’ Rivette himself says).  Cinema will never be the same, and neither will we.”  I cannot undersell how enterprising and fascinating this is.  This idea of a film critiquing itself within the outlines of a reinvention of itself is truly revolutionary, and not even Godard at his most deconstructively fiery could reach these heights.  Of this, Rivette says, “Film is not granite or stone.  It lives.  A general release of one version does nothing to change that.”

Jonathan Rosenbaum writes, "Complicating the textual status of Out 1 still further is the 255-minute Out 1: Spectre, which Rivette spent the better part of a year editing out of the original material. Part of the fascinating difference between the two films can be seen in the ways that identical footage can often carry disparate meanings and perform radically different dramatic and narrative functions according to its separate placement in each film. (The opening shot of Spectre, for instance, occurs almost three hours into the serial. One of the more striking differences in the long version is that Michel Lonsdale, the director of one of the film's two theater groups, emerges as the central character -- not only because of his role in guiding his group's improvisations and psychic self-explorations, but also because his ambiguous role as a rather infantile patriarch becomes pivotal to the overall movement of the plot.)"

As I am on hold while facing vexing but not insurmountable production troubles on the thriller I am directing, promoting my newest film A Simple Game of Catch, and in early pre-production on a film I am co-directing in San Francisco, I have decided to “do a Rivette” on my 2011 feature The Idiotmaker’s Gravity Tour.  I have taken this task upon myself knowing that there is enough material that was never used in the original version, which makes such a prospect exciting for me as its principal creator.  Insofar that every film one makes is like a child to its filmmaker father/mother, I will have eventually given birth to twins.  In considering this upcoming recut of my own film, seeing my raw material anew with a fresh pair of eyes courtesy of the sweet immunities granted by time and distance, and calling to mind how exceptional Rivette’s cinematic “reinveted films” are, I started thinking about what other films for which I would love to see make-overs — and not out of discontent for the films the way they are currently, but out of an awareness of and excitement for their own elasticity.

Not every film warrants reinvention, however, and some films warrant it more than others.  For instance, in the creatively fertile early 70’s, it seems that shooting ratios (i.e. the ratio of raw film shot to film elements used in the final cut) were at the most “insane” for American film.  It was not uncommon for filmmakers to shoot almost a million feet of film for a 90-minute motion picture.  In perhaps the most exploratory and intensely probing period for actual film production, when single scenes became encounter sessions and epic-scale improvisatory wonder-reels, and when the editing process became something akin to active sculpting of the unwieldy moving parts, the possibilities for re-toolings works of this nature are endless.

Similarly, The Idiotmaker’s Gravity Tour, a film which pays homage to many of the pictures of that period, was simply a constant discovery in that the cameras just rolled often with only the vague outline of a game-plan, ending up with a prodigiously large shooting ratio and material at which I ultimately chizzeled away for over a year.  As a result, I have one finished film and loads of unused material that I’ve been turning over in my head for some time, and I now believe I can tell another story (or at least another side of the same story) with this wealth of rushes.  The new work will be titled Teschlock’s Whale.

Below are some other films which, to me, are the most promising candidates for Rivettian re-imaginings, by sheer virtue of the nature of the projects and the rumors of their shooting ratios.

The Last Movie (1971, Directed by Dennis Hopper)  Wild stories of this film’s production are truly the stuff of legends.  Running the gamut from a dancing-wild-in-the-aisles airplane trip to Peru with cast and crew, to a drug-fueled flying-by-the-seat-of-your-pants shooting schedule, The Last Movie has time and again been used as an example of the wretched excesses of the New American Cinema of the early 70’s.  I am one of a steadily growing number of admirers, however, who find that film extraordinary, or at the very least challenging and brilliantly daring.  Albeit, this is through the lens of four decades having gone with the wind.  It is certainly one of the few examples of abstract expressionist filmmaking.  Dennis Hopper himself used the term “abstract expressionism” to describe the film’s bold editing techniques in the now rarely seen 1988 documentary Out of the Blue and Into the Black.  At the time of its original 1971 inception, though, it was barely released and promptly buried as an incomprehensible failure of the first order.  As rumor has it, cult director Alejandro Jodorowsky (of El Topo and The Holy Mountain fame) goaded Hopper to rip an early more straightforward edit apart in favor of a final version that would, among other things, more directly insure traumatizing the Universal Pictures execs.  Most of all, though, what the current edit of the film does is test the elasticity of the film form to muse on its fallibility and its beautiful fallacies.  One can witness an unhinged Hopper in Taos, New Mexico editing The Last Movie first-hand in L.M. Kit Carson’s documentary The American Dreamer, and that can tell you an awful lot about Hopper’s chaotic, tripped-out headspace while putting the film together.  A miscellaneous brigade of hippies and transients that Hopper encountered in Taos had their go at shaping the film’s final form.  However, knowing what the shooting ratio was on The Last Movie and knowing what must have gone on while on location in Peru makes one chostle in wonderment about how a Rivettian reinvention of the material would play.  Unfortunately, Hopper has left the planet, so we will most likely never know.  As is, it is a film that has angered and frustrated audiences for decades.  That does not take away from the fact that the film is still brilliant and original…even if it were only by sheer virtue of being itself loud and proud.

One-Eyed Jacks (1961, Directed by Marlon Brando)  The workprint Brando turned into Paramount Pictures in 1961 for his Method Acting Western-revenge saddle-drama was over five hours long.  At 141 minutes, the film still holds the record for the largest shooting ratio in Hollywood history, with six times the amount of footage normally shot on a picture of that size.  First-time director Marlon Brando assumed the director’s chair after personally firing Stanley Kubrick.  Cineastes have been trying to envision for years how a Kubrick-directed One-Eyed Jacks would have played.  What transpired as a result of Kubrick’s firing was a genre-constrained acting workshop for Brando and his band of undoubtedly bewildered actors.  Just how much and how substantially the film could be altered and re-focused will probably be forever left to the imagination, as the footage is most likely long deteriorated and/or destroyed.  As it is, One-Eyed Jacks would most definitely make my top-ten favorite Westerns list, and is also a favorite of Martin Scorsese, mostly because it takes a standard cowboy-bandit revenge tale and injects a healthy dose of Stanislavsky, in which we can see Brando wired at his most layered and finely tuned since On the Waterfront—and it’s a small wonder that his career petered out for over ten years after this film’s completion, as his amount of exertion on this film probably made him run out of gas fast.  One can only wonder if the mountains of unused material could yield a solid reinvented edit, but I personally have faith that there most likely was enough.  Concerning even his five-hour cut, Brando was unhappy with the final product.  Of it, he said, "It's a good picture for Paramount, but it's not the picture I made.  Now, the characters in the film are black-and-white, not gray-and-human as I planned them."

A Safe Place (1971, Directed by Henry Jaglom) According to a 1971 public television talk show featuring film critic Molly Haskell in which she interviews Peter Bogdanovich and Henry Jaglom about their respective films’ inclusion in that year’s New York Film Festival, Bogdanovich reveals that Jaglom shot enough material on his debut film, the 94-minute A Safe Place, to render at least two finished films.  Unused material apparently included a lost scene of Bogdanovich himself dancing and juggling.  Bogdanovich later says in that same talk-show interview, “I think Henry just wanted it for his scrapbook.”  In interviews decades after the aborted Columbia release of the sharply polarizing A Safe Place, Jaglom claimed that he shot around 65,000 feet of film on the project, rendering his shooting ratio somewhere in the range of 15:1.  Considering both this prodigious shooting ratio and the breezily experimental nature of the film, a hallucinatory and fragmentary journey into the world of a young woman’s complex emotional life, one can easily and with very little concerted effort imagine an alternate Rivettian reinvention of the material, and one that would zero in on other themes and aspects of Jaglom’s simultaneously loose but tightly structured tableau.  Then again, truth be told, it would also be interesting just to see Bogdanovich dance on camera.  Jaglom remembers the film's massacre in the press: "The New York Times or Time Magazine said the film looked like it had been tossed in the air and landed in a mix-master."  The film dabbles in a variety of thematic areas including memory, illusion, time and its repercussions in the world of human emotion and, in many ways, women's liberation.  The character tries to find her "safe place" by, among other things, willfully abstaining from the world at large, rather than by clawing away at her identity.  These are rather capacious thematic aspects, each worthy of their own film (or even their own recut and reinvention).  Screen tests featured on the Criterion Collection DVD of the film intimate that scenes existed between characters who, in the finished version, passed like ships in the night (e.g. the characters played by Phillip Proctor and Gwen Welles share a seduction scene in the screen tests, and never share a moment together in the final cut).  Jack Nicholson’s appearance in the final cut of the film feels deliberately capricious and fly-by-night, suggesting to me that his scenes were heavily workshopped as the cameras rolled mag after mag.   Orson Welles’ “wonder rabbi” character, the presiding spirit in Tuesday Weld’s character’s fractured cine-psyche, seems similarly urged towards in-the-moment invention by a general on-set spirit.  Evidently, Jaglom also captured a collection of encounters with various personal friends and personal acquaintances for the film, as well as recording every nook and cranny of his parents’ posh Central Park West apartment as it existed in 1970.  Now, one can most likely only imagine, and leave it at that.  As an addendum, Jaglom’s sophomore feature, the 90-minute Tracks, is perhaps equally a candidate for Rivettian reinvention, as an early version of that film allegedly ran four hours.

Scenes from a Marriage (1973, Directed by Ingmar Bergman)  It would seem as if Bergman chose to shoot Scenes from a Marriage in much the same style as Rivette shot both Out 1 and La belle noiseuse, with a copious amount of angles that could serve in visually and psychologically re-contextualizing the audience's experience of watching the tremulous marriage between Liv Ullman and Erland Josephson disintegrate, if re-edited in such a way.  Bergman's objective in making this film seems quite focused and incisive, however, and it is doubtful that he would have ever entertained a reinvented version of this film, although it was ultimately condensed from a 281-minute Swedish miniseries down to a 173-minute American theatrical film—and there is a palpable difference in the rate of an audience's appreciable emotional exhaustion between the two cuts.  Woody Allen's Husbands and Wives could similarly be re-imagined in this vein, considering its kamikaze jump-cut hand-held style.  In Episode/Chapter 5 of Scenes from a Marriage, titled "The Illiterates," the ferocious argument over the signing of the couple's divorce papers constitutes the majority of screen time.  It is a sequence whose power and message solely relies on the conviction of the actors and the precision in the rhythm of cutting, and Bergman does establish such a precision.  As much as there are different ways of painting a landscape or a face, there are a myriad of ways to cut a scene, with every bit as much precision.  Rivette's use of alternate angles in an early dinner scene of La belle noiseuse/Divertimento alone renders a different scene both psychologically and emotionally.  Scenes from a Marriage is perhaps one of the most exciting prospects for a reinvented film, but alas, it will most likely never happen.

Coming Apart (1969, Directed by Milton Moses Ginsberg) Director Ginsberg once mentioned in an interview that the cut he originally delivered to the distributor was four hours long.  As is, the film is a 110-minute series of hidden-camera encounters that psychiatrist Rip Torn has with a parade of unusual and often damaged women.  I have written about this film before, in my article about New York mayoral eras on film (despite the fact that we never leave Rip Torn's high-rise apartment over the entire length of the film).  One of the words that leaps to mind about Coming Apart is "raw" in that its edgy caught-in-real-time technical parameters and its frenzied penchant for emotional outbursts do much to jangle the nerves.  Much could be done in the editing room to render a different take on the events in the film.  This example is certainly more difficult to discuss relative to the other films I have profiled, in that it is perhaps the most confounding and discursive of the five examples.  Ginsberg certainly does not lack a sophistication in his approach, but the work itself can appear rather unforgivingly rough-and-tumble on a cursory glance.  The majority of the film is shot in long takes, and every cut is met with a harsh punch on the audio track, making us wholly cognizant of the cut itself.  I have often tried to imagine the alternate cut of the film which would function more of a scrapbook of bedlam, cutting more often than it does and often returning to fragments of the encounters that would build towards another design.  The centerpiece of the film is undoubtedly an orgiastic gathering of spaced-out individuals which occurs about an hour into the film.  Presenting this sequence alone in a kind of fragmentary manner would shape Coming Apart into something wholly other.

The Best and Worst Films of 2009 (and What I Missed in 2008)

For a guy who claims to find the practice of best-of/favorite listmaking a senseless, futile and mind-numbing exercise, I certainly do make a whole lot of ‘em. Look no further than the right column of this blog to take notice of that, and the two articles below this entry, for that matter. However, to reiterate, I do feel that, despite the drawbacks inherent to such lists, mostly the fact that quantifying the quality of one’s intake of movie-watching through lists is not what movies are about, they are still dialogue-starting stimulants, as well as gauges of one’s taste and judgment despite their inherent fallibility. I find that readers appreciate reading them as well. So, here we have it: the obligatory 2009 Best-of lists.

I was not at all proud of my 2008 list (I mean, come on, it has to be a pretty rough year when I name Vicky Cristina Barcelona as my best, even though John Waters did the same). Keep in mind I also missed more 2008 films than I care to mention because I was making and promoting two of my own films at that time. Therefore, I have added an extra section at the bottom (i.e. the “Best of What I Missed in 2008 and Saw in 2009 List”) to make up for that. Unless you are a working full-time critic, it is nearly impossible to see all the notable films of a single year in a compressed amount of time. All in all, however, 2009 was a much better year for cinema than 2008, in my opinion (neither year can hold a candle to the amazing 2007, however).

Also, it is necessary that I affirmatively lay down some ground rules. I got into some trouble last year when a few people pointed out a few films of foreign origin they felt I missed or unjustly ignored, which I had counted as 2007 films. The rule I am setting down is as follows: If the movie has an official 2008 release year and made it to the United States in 2009, I will henceforth count it as a 2009 release. Basically, whatever year the films would be up for American awards consideration is what I am counting. So here we go…


THE 10 BEST OF THE YEAR LIST

1. Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino) Truth be told, I never thought I would see the day when I would name any Tarantino film as the best of the year. However, I could not seem to shake the feeling that the film was somehow important, particularly at this moment in time. Inglourious Basterds is a film that accepts itself as reflection and not as recreation or representation. I am going to begin making my case for this film’s importance by asking a stupefyingly and inanely naïve question: How many films have been made about history, or how many have depicted historical events? “Oh, come on!” I know, I know, a stupid question, but just bear with me. Easy answer? Lots and lots and lots. What this film does is build a war movie around other war movies at a time when the traditional film about historical incident has knowingly lost any sense of enterprise and originality, despite a machine in the habit of churning out the old models in snazzy little packages, and despite the dazed and deluded machinists who respond to this loss by just shrugging and saying “C’est la vie” in an ineffectual murmur. As we have entered an increasingly tongue-in-cheek post-post-modern era in which it has become harder to jar audiences loose from viewer complacency, Inglourious Basterds stands alone as a film that tests our sense for what a historical film should be and how it should function (for one, it challenges a viewer’s implicit need for rigid adherence to truth and historical “fact,” cognizant that aspirations to such things are misguided and foolish, regardless of any degree of earnestness and good intention). Some have called this film “revenge pornography” and “grossly irresponsible populist fantasy” without recognizing that these are both used as platforms to address the meanings we glean from the idea of popular memory depicted in a popular medium. It functions on so many levels that, even after a few subsequent additional viewings, I still find it mind-boggling.

Some claim it is mired in a devil-may-care sense of social responsibility, but Tarantino is perhaps the first to recognize, at least within the confines of the Hollywood machine, that the only way to be truly socially responsible at this stage in American movie history is to test our perceptions of what it really means to make so-called “socially responsible works”. He does that by pushing these unspoken standards, and that in and of itself is extraordinary. However obvious the following statement is, people still go to a theater and have no trouble accepting “true stories” as truth and cannot see that the real truth has been filtered through a medium that worships technique, mechanism, maneuver, aesthetic elbow grease, and takes liberties to do so. Inglourious Basterds has enough technique, mechanism, maneuver, aesthetic elbow grease and taken liberties to jam into three movies, and the fact that it possesses all that speaks to its intention, i.e. the intention I mention above. To reitereate, Inglourious Basterds is a film that accepts itself as reflection and not as recreation or representation. The film is extraordinary and is, in my opinion, thus far Tarantino’s masterpiece, which is funny considering that the final line of dialogue in the film is “I think this could be my masterpiece”. For every bit of "bang-bang," there is just as much (if not more) "talk-talk," and his nonstop referencing of pop-culture for once works like clockwork in this movie, and it doesn't strain the film's progression at any point. In fact, this element is integral to it. All this, of course, comes from someone who has never been a fan, and someone who has even been a flagrant, vocal disliker of Tarantino’s much-praised work. This one is different and it is certainly his most mature film. Never have a seen such a specimen: a “historical” film pointedly about historical films, and at the same time I was enormously and gratefully entertained without the need to be “in on the joke(s)” overshadowing my being unconditionally absorbed (even though as a cinephile I most certainly was in on the jokes). Also, every single performance is par excellence, particularly Christoph Waltz as the sly, conspicuously poised, multi-lingual German commandant. If this performance doesn’t earn Waltz an Oscar, I’ll eat my head with my hat on it. And I have never enjoyed the stone-jawed Brad Pitt more, even counting his hilarious comic turn in last year’s Burn After Reading.

And who puts veteran Rod Taylor in a scene together with Mike Myers? Even the most surly critic of the film has to acknowledge this as astonishing. This gutsy, thinking-out-of-the-box type of “stunt” is part and parcel of an artistic voice that I am finding, in some ways, more and more irresistible.


2. The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke) Haneke’s latest is a masterpiece by any measure of the word. Visually, narratively and otherwise, I just cannot say enough about it. Before I went to see it at Film Forum this past week, I saw it described as "a ghost story without a ghost". This is very apt. Haneke's output in the past ten years has always been, by and large, quite substantial. From The Piano Teacher to Cache to this film, which I think might very well be his masterpiece, he has stood as one of the most solid and consistently successful directors working in the international cinema scene. The only thing that prevented this from occupying the number one spot currently occupied by the Tarantino's film is what I perceive as Inglourious Basterds doing double duty as both popular entertainment and timeless commentary on the nature of a genre that has spawned thousands upon thousands of films that have, heretofore, failed to truly recognize what that film recognizes. In terms of achievements in cinema aesthetics the year, however, I hand the mega-gold prize to The White Ribbon. It confidently captures and evokes the spirit of Bergman without imitation and being affectedly Bermanesque, thus managing to be a creature all its own, entirely fresh and visionary. The black-and-white photography is gorgeous, the performances (particularly those of the children) are simultaneously restrained and direct, and as a result, tremendously touching. This one is as good as they come.


3. A Serious Man (The Coen Brothers) For awhile, I thought this would be the number one film of the year on the list. Much of this is due to personal proclivity because the movie’s focus and its subject hit very close to my heart and head. However, the film met with curious reactions from the ethno-religious group it depicted. I would hear many-a conflicting report about it being passed from ear to ear when I would attend synagogue on shabbos from week to week. I saw it the first week it played at a multiplex on 86th Street and I immediately fell in love with it. When you discuss the voluminous content of the film with someone, one thing that is extraordinary is that the conversation is never quick nor can it be rushed. Identity, the nature of faith and belief, the uncertainty principle, what it means to ascribe meaning to things we cannot explain, the collapse of the Midwestern suburban American family, unwitting victims, what it means to be a "serious man," a father, a good man, a Jew. One can have a lengthy conversation about the shtetl prologue of the film alone. This is perhaps my personal favorite of the Coen Brothers' output this decade. It seems the closest work to them...as people as well as filmmakers. And, despite a circulating and epidemic opinion, the film is really no way anti-Semitic. I remember reading a hysterical (and nonsensical) account in The Village Voice by a writer who claimed that it was the work of vehemently self-hating Jews. That would be as short-sighted and facile as calling Do the Right Thing racist, or calling Meet John Doe communist.


4. 36 Views from the Pic San Loup (Around a Small Mountain) (Jacques Rivette) I, for one, hope that Time Out magazine’s claim about the possibility of this being Jacques Rivette’s final film is just rumor. Maybe they do have a case, however, because this is the notoriously lengthy director’s shortest film to date at 84 minutes. Was a regular three-hour outing too much for the reportedly ailing 81-year-old French master? That is immaterial and maybe an ill-founded basis for my believing the rumor because these 84 minutes are certainly among some of the best in his distinguished career. The themes are familiar (i.e. illusion, the struggles of artists, the nature of theater, the mysteries of interpersonal relationships) but, as always, he continues to stretch these themes, economize them and render them in ways that are new and exciting. The story revolves around an Italian drifter who decides to tail a circus company passing through a string of small villages in the northern France. An awkward romance develops between him and a female member of the company (Rivette alumnus Jane Birkin), but struggles to understand why she remains so distant towards him. The film's jarring finale is pure Rivette. That is not to say that the rest of the film isn't. In fact, the classic Rivette themes are more present than ever. If it is my favorite filmmaker's farewell film, it's a good one (and a fitting one, if I may say) to go out on. You could almost make the claim that the film is very consciously a farewell. I could go on and on about this, but you would have to see the film and then get a sense of Rivette's public image.


5. The Limits of Control (Jim Jarmusch) This one isn’t going to make many peoples’ best-of-2009 list. I know that many filmgoers found it a troubling, enigmatic and self-indulgent exercise in smarmy arthouse alienation tactics. Jarmusch has reached a point in his career, however, where he feels absolutely comfortable in continuing to deliver openly and welcomely idiosyncratic films that remain integral to the style he pioneered back in the 80's with the groundbreaking Stranger Than Paradise and Down by Law, still keeping it fresh as opposed to tired and knee-jerk. I originally saw this in a theater on the Soho area where you would expect that Jarmusch's films would draw the biggest crowds. When I went there, however, it clearly wasn't. I have since purchased the film on video and have seen it again since. It is rare that an American film has a sensibility that feels as European as this. Shot and set throughout Spain, The Limits of Control in the spirit of existential theater and literature features characters lacking names (they are instead called things like Lone Man, Creole, French, Blonde, etc.), and only two of whom are played by "Jarmusch Repertory Company" members, namely Bill Murray and Tilda Swinton. It is the kind of story concept a filmmaker like Antonioni would have loved. In spite of its perhaps justified lack of popularity, I still think it has a voice that most other films this year lacked...and I, for one, think it is an exceptional film.


6. Tetro (Francis Ford Coppola) I was truly surprised to see how soon everyone forgot about this one in their year-end round-ups. "O, so soon we forget!" Coppola’s digital follow-up to his 2006 digitally-shot critical and financial failure Youth Without Youth faired amazingly well in critical circles this past spring, countering his previous film's failure. Featuring the notoriously irascible Vincent Gallo in the lead, the film is one that reminds us that Francis Ford Coppola can still make substantive contributions to film art as it stands today. I personally think it is very fitting that Coppola has returned to this comparably smaller and more personal production model. Youth Without Youth and Tetro are the types of the films that his company American Zoetrope was originally built to produce and distribute. He is doing exciting things now with the digital form that American Zoetrope aspired to do back at its first inception, but never really succeeded in doing (short of Lucas' THX 1138). It is exciting that he seems to be finally realizing his long-held, deep-seated ambition to helm these more personal works, and this one is the first recent effort to truly succeed in really every department. I also identify with the film's story for personal reasons, and that only heightened my appreciation of it.


7. Enter the Void (Gaspar Noe) This, along with Von Trier’s Anti-Christ, was the most scandalous film of this year’s Cannes Film Festival. It has not been released stateside yet, but I was able to see it through let's just say "other means". Noe is the director who gave us the equally controversial Irreversible (2002) and he was heard to have called Enter the Void a "psychedelic melodrama" in that the film is just as much of a sensory experience as it is a story (although there is most certainly a story). I have chosen it for this list because this is a film that defies convention in nearly every conceivable way. Its ventures into unpleasantry are occasionally hard to sit through but, throughout it all, you get the sense of a director testing the constraints, the boundaries and the limits of the form and the medium itself without over-indulging himself too heavily. This is something for which I immediately look when I am analyzing degrees to which films are cutting edge these days, as it is obviously becoming more challenging to challenge a form that is constantly being challenged in new ways every day, especially as digital media become more accessible. Enter the Void makes bold strides in forging new paths for telling stories, even if the journey isn't always a pleasant one. This should be a film that lives on, not just for its provocative, sure-to-be-censored content, but for its guts.


8. The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow) This one would seem to be this year's prime Oscar bait. Even as a summer release with little fanfare, it drew a great deal of attention at a very early stage in the awards race, but that is neither here nor there really. The United States has not given us a truly compelling or gripping war film in quite some time. Bigelow's The Hurt Locker functions as many things. It goes without saying that the film is a gripping commentary on America's involvement in the current Iraq War, telling a story of which one could easily allegorize: the story of a bomb defuser part of a bomb-squad operating like frantic surgeons in a city where everyone could go up in smoke at a single frozen moment. Yeah yeah, right. Allegories are passe these days. What Bigelow does well is dip the movie in large vats of adrenaline, directing it so effectively that you will swear suspense has rarely, if ever, been this agonizingly suspenseful. This is one of those movies where I felt myself almost tremoring as I was leaving the theater. What the film allowed us to recognize is the U.S. film market's burgeoning aversion to uber-topicality. Think Vietnam movies, for instance. Besides John Wayne's inept The Green Berets (1968), Hollywood steadfastly refused to bankroll war-genre films about the war in southeast Asia until well after the fact. The Hurt Locker would seems to exist thoroughly as the first successful non-documentary film about American military involvement in Iraq, and it does not make it a fleeting, wasted or self-important experience. To use Full Metal Jacket terminology, with this movie "Hollywood's grown a pair," thanks ironically to the help of a trail-blazing female director.


9. The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (Terry Gilliam) Poor Terry Gilliam. Lady Luck just doesn't like hanging out in his corner for some reason. It seems that every film he makes is fraught with production trouble. What happened during this production is old news (if you don't know, somebody died...an actor, someone you should probably know really) and how Gilliam proceeded to complete the film shows that, despite the hardships that seem to effortlessly trot his way, the man has some get-up-and-go that hasn't gotten up and left (even when maybe it easily would have). This year, he delivers another piece-de-resistance in the fantasy genre. From the man who brought us The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and Time Bandits comes a film that sports that signature style and depicts the fantastical in similar ways, but one which continues to trudge the path in furthering where the previous films left off, specifically in the visuals department. Gilliam has not lost one iota of his command of delivering some spectacular visuals (we all know that this has always been his strong-suit). Following his dreary Tideland, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is a most welcome bit of redemption, as he makes us aware that he continues carrying his own torch...and, boy oh boy, does it blaze!


10. Born in 68 (Olivier Ducastel) This film met with virtually no fanfare when it arrived in the States. It played at a few domestic festivals, won a couple awards and then saw a no-frills video release. As one who has studied and continues to study May 1968 in films as well as history books and literature, this epic drama, while failing to capture the time and its aftermath as artfully as Philippe Garrel's Regular Lovers (2005) did, still packed a punch of great emotional and intellectual resonance. The story is epically ambitious. We follow various couples during the May 68. The film covers the span of twenty plus years, examining the aftermath of that time of demonstrations, street guerrilla warfare and youthful idealism, staying with the characters well after the fact to observe the impact that the era has had on their children, all the way up until the early 90's when it appears that two of these children born in 68 are HIV-positive. The film is a very curious epic that was originally conceived as a French miniseries, then eventually released as an actual film. It stands as a lucid historical examination on the dovetailing of history, the evolution of civil unrest and the path towards transcendence from oppression.


HONORABLE MENTIONS: Funny People (Judd Apatow), Where the Wild Things Are (Spike Jonze), The Beaches of Agnes (Agnes Varda), The Maid (Sebastian Silva), Hunger (Steve McQueen)

STILL NEED TO SEE: TOO MUCH


THE DISAPPOINTMENTS OF THE YEAR

1. New York, I Love You (Various) I was invited to a preview screening of this film many months before its actual release. I have a soft spot for omnibus movies and had enjoyed Paris je t’aime, so the bar had been set high. Instead, I was treated to one kitschy, irritating short after another. This is all without mentioning…a-hem…Brett Ratner’s installment. Pound for pound, short for short, this is a whopping disappointment beyond any scope of belief. It is frustrating partly because it seems as though every filmmaker felt drawn to the “young-and-hip-strangers-meet-funny-banter-follows” formula. And if it wasn’t that, we were treated to (if I may quote Wayne from Wayne’s World) “alienating and pristine” episodes like Shekhar Kapur's (penned by Anthony Minghella, to whom the film is dedicated) featuring Julie Christie and Shia LaBeouf…or Shunji Awai's episode, which features a cloyingly "cute" Christina Ricci and Orlando Bloom. After the preview screening, I was handed a survey, on which the question “What was your favorite episode?” was posed. Reading down the list, I started to laugh heartily and shake my head in disillusionment, because I’ll be damned if I could even remember most of them, even five minutes after the final fade-out, and I have an extremely good memory. When the welcome presence of Eli Wallach cannot redeem a single thing about the film, you know you’re in trouble. I think I’ll skip the upcoming Shanghai omnibus, thank you very much. That’s okay because I’m not a big China fan anyway. I'll live if I miss it.

2. The Lovely Bones (Peter Jackson) One could argue that the critics were just waiting to jump on this adaptation of Alice Sebold's pop-literature neo-gothic novel. After all, I remember hearing a story about how Pauline Kael warned Spielberg that he was riding for a fall following two major successes, and that she would be unsparing of cruelty in her review of his next film. She was (but then again, so was everyone, because we are talking about 1941). I did agree with something I read, however, which said that Jackson did not direct the film the way it needed to be directed: quietly, delicately. Any sense of nuance and subtlety is absent, perhaps because Jackson has been painting in outlandishly broad strokes for so long, in works like the Lord of the Rings trilogy and King Kong. However, I cannot fault Saoirse Ronan in the lead role, even if I tried.

3. Irene in Time (Henry Jaglom) I am going out on a limb here because I know most of the people involved in the making of this film. For one, its director was interviewed for this website a few months back. I also had the unique opportunity of sitting in on some of the editing of the film, and I had seen three rough cuts of it at various points of its post-production before attending its premiere at the DGA Theater in Los Angeles this past June. I feel, however, despite any allegiances or biases, that it is still my duty to be honest and upfront about reviewing this year’s successes and disappointments and, to me, Irene in Time stands as one of the year’s major disappointments. Jaglom’s film is ostensibly an examination of the complex relationships between fathers and daughters, which is actually a novel concept. The means by which that concept is explored, however, is what is ultimately suspect and faulty. What we are treated to is a parade of shallow and/or vehemently irritating characters prone to lounging poolside and spending many a workless day kvetching, moping and chatterboxing about their “daddies” at endless impromptu roundtable discussions. Shallowness really pervades this film. Why do I really care about this particular rich woman character whose only problem is that she cannot find an ideal boyfriend/husband to replace her father? What does that mean to me? Okay, sure, I'm a man. That said, I doubt that, excepting a few moments in the film, even women would connect to it in the way Jaglom wants them to. The real crime is that little effort is made to make one care. The character is just not compelling and is, instead, inordinately taxing of one's patience. The pseudo-documentary/fiction hybrid form which once seemed, at the very least, fresh and emotionally raw and compelling in films like Eating and Someone to Love feels forced, seemingly over-solicited, strained from every angle in this film. When people even take to talking about their fathers to strangers at parties, you know the director needs to cool it and take a few steps back with his theme for it to be rendered to its fullest potential.

The actors seem game, but the director seems less concerned with reality, emotional or otherwise — this film resembles no reality that I or anyone in my wide circle of friends knows — than making some kind of point that, despite the specificity of his focus, is still inconclusive and muddled. Its inconclusiveness is just the cherry on the cake really. Tanna Frederick has a terrific screen presence, a scrupulous and awesome ability to step into any emotion and a truly amazing instrument, but in this film she lacks a director who can mold that natural passion and performance intuition into something focused, articulate and truly impactful. Instead, her director allows an unwieldly performance that goes all over the place, testing the audience’s tolerance of Jaglom's and Frederick's self-indulgence in gapingly bold strokes. Also, motivations given to other actors seem to be frustratingly and overtly one-note (e.g. “Act this way,” “Act that way”). Other supporting players, like Karen Black and David Proval, feel underutilized and also misdirected, and screen-time that should have been more theirs is given to actors like newcomer Lanre Indewu who, to be frank, really grated on me. Jaglom has a singular voice that is unique in cinema, but this is far and away his worst film. Although this undisputed “chick flick” adds up to very little (New York Times critic Jeannette Catsoulis, in a review that basically panned the film, called it a "letter bomb to men"), it still stands out among other films, however, due to the virtues of that singular directorial voice. By the way, Jaglom makes the claim that he appreciates both the good and bad reviews he receives, so in theory he should love this write-up. No one could have made this film except for Jaglom…and that might be enough. But, to be totally honest, this film isn’t even close to being good...not at all. Andrea Marcovicci’s excellent performance, though, is one of the film’s saving graces. But again, underutilized.

4. The Girlfriend Experience (Steven Soderbergh) This is one of those films that is not easy to talk about, and that fact, despite my disappointment in it, is one of the film’s virtues. Nonetheless, I feel that this film’s biggest offense is that, in less time than anyone is willing to truly acknowledge, this film will acquire the “quaint time capsule” moniker and, to supplement the limiting nature of its topicality, it seems much too pleased with itself to really appeal loud and clear to much of anyone. It will not live on because it was made expressly for the time it was made in. Soderbergh’s thesis on the economic crisis may very well be articulate and sophisticated, but he has failed to make a film without an expiration date. The Girlfriend Experience will turn into a "curio" in less time than I think anyone is giving it credit for. Time capsules can be fascinating, but I think films should stand on their own and implicitly comment on the state of things, lest they become too topical and lose their impact watching them in retrospect. As Milos Forman said at a Q&A at Film Forum recently, “All you have to do is really mean what you say and feel it way down deep and, no matter what the film is about, it will immediately become political."

Soderbergh is a hero of mine because of his prodigious nature, the frequency with which he makes stuff and his methods of making it. And he hasn’t sold himself out to either "side" (i.e. the mainstream vs. arthouse markets, which has been a slippery slope for every other filmmaker to juggle, even those who consciously strive to balance both methods and audiences). He’s the guy who says, “I’m going to make this little movie in between these two big ones.” I exploded with delight when I discovered just recently that he had directed another “small indie” totally on the fly and on the spur of the moment whilst directing the play Tot Mom on stage overseas (using the same cast of the play for the film). He has a passion for filmmaking and for the form that is unparalleled and especially rare among well-known working filmmakers today. While porn-star-gone-legit Sasha Gray needed to portray her call-girl character with the air of entitlement and cold privilege that envelops her performance, she is a downright lousy actress and it was difficult to stomach her performance most of the time. The actors playing her clients were also much too self-conscious and felt like amateurs. In essence, it is not just the lead actress but the whole film (and its director) that seem to have a feeling of irritating entitlement and self-importance, which I cannot wrap my head around. The recession is prime target for a filmic treatment (I would stop short of thinking that Wall Street 2 will have something important to say), but this one fell way short of the mark for me.


5. Whatever Works (Woody Allen) Woody has certainly made worse in this decade. Remember Melinda and Melinda (which occupies the top spot in my “Worst of Woody Allen” list) and Scoop? However, I expected more from a collaboration between him and Larry David, even beyond what seemed to be predicted as a raucous schlemeil-athon. Although a good many of the jokes fell flat and the characters were one-dimensional cardboard cut-outs, I cannot call this a total disappointment. Woody’s worsts, to me, fullfill my entertainment needs more than others’ best. However, I was neither able to be seriously analytical nor was I able to laugh freely without feeling duty-bound. And I find myself constantly amused by Woody’s curiously guarded and conservative depiction of gay and lesbian characters. You feel he wants to break out and do it right, but he still remains cautious and perhaps prudish, which itself is something rather funny to think about. He remains one of America’s premier film artists and he has taken great strides towards growth in this past decade, opening himself up to experimentation.



THE WORST FILM OF THE YEAR:

Anti-Christ (Lars Von Trier) Much too much has already been written about this film, which is certainly the most controversial offering of the year, and the grand majority of what has been written is not flattering. Even the word “unflattering” is a euphemism, so I am not going to join my fellow movie scribblers in debunking it at length because that would be just yet another highly unoriginal case of been-there-done-that. I wish I could say that the film’s bad press is just critical short-sightedness, but I most certainly cannot. The film, although a few of its elements are of intrigue (although they are never properly fleshed out or even understood by the artist conceiving it), is almost irredeemable. The main problem with it is perhaps the most simple, fundamental issue and the one that is actually directly under my nose as a viewer: Why was the thing even made? Even Lars Von Trier doesn’t seem to know why. If it simply, and only, functions as an outlet, a vent, for its director’s deep suicidal depression and his misogyny…well, that is no reason for the existence of anything, lest it be made for the artist and the artist alone with no intention of it being seen by anyone else. Von Trier’s well-known reputation as a shameless self-promoter, press-hound and provocateur is at hand here. What I can affirmatively tell you is that unmotivated sexual violence is insufferable and nearly impossible to sit through.



BEST OF WHAT I MISSED IN 2008 AND SAW IN 2009

Note: I have composed a new Best of 2008 list in light of new films seen. The ones that were on the list last year have been re-ordered to accommodate the new 2008 titles I recently saw. The titles on last year's list appear in bold.

1. Waltz With Bashir (Ari Forman)
2. My Winnipeg (Guy Maddin)
3. Vicky Cristina Barcelona (Woody Allen)
3. Man on Wire (James Marsh)
4. Frozen River (Courtney Hunt)
5. Medicine for Melancholy (Barry Jenkins)
6. Let the Right One In (Tomas Alfredson)
7. Gomorrah (Matteo Garrone)
8. Milk (Gus Van Sant)
9. Synecdoche, New York (Charlie Kaufman)
10. Che (Steven Soderbergh)

RUNNERS-UP: 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (Cristian Mungiu), The Wrestler (Darren Aronofsky), The Wackness (Jonathan Levine), Tropic Thunder (Ben Stiller), Slumdog Millionaire (Danny Boyle)


LOOKING FORWARD TO SEEING THESE IN 2010:

And Everything is Going Fine (Steven Soderbergh): There are personal reasons I feel so eager to see this, Steven Soderbergh's long awaited documentary about Spalding Gray. I made a documentary essay film a couple years back called Yarns to Be Spun on the Way to the Happy Home that examined the life and career of Spalding Gray in a way that was very personal to me. I am curious to see how a filmmaker like Soderbergh frames the man's story.

Tree of Life (Terence Malick): Honestly, what movie nerd isn't looking forward to this one? I would venture to say that even Malick the Opus Filmmaker's detractors look forward to his upcoming new work.

You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (Woody Allen): I always anticipate the next Woody. It's like a default button. Like the old tune goes, "I'm with ya rain or shine." And, as usual, he has assembled a truly interesting cast (Anthony Hopkins, Naomi Watts, Antonio Banderes, Josh Brolin, Lucy Punch).

Shutter Island (Martin Scorsese): After seeing a rather underwhelming trailer, I am a little less anxious to see this than I was. But I still want to see it. Trailers can be deceiving in the extreme.

Greenberg (Noah Baumbach): I'm curious to see where Baumbach goes after his fascinating film Margot at the Wedding which showed me he was growing, maturing and evolving as a filmmaker.

Queen of the Lot (Henry Jaglom): I may have given Henry Jaglom a bad review for Irene in Time this year, but I am looking forward to this sequel to his 2006 film Hollywood Dreams which, even though I also had a great deal of problems with, I still enjoyed (at least more than Irene in Time).

The Social Network (David Fincher): David Fincher is making a Facebook movie? What the Sam Hill? It just goes to show you that wonders never cease!

Two Well-Oiled Machines: An Exclusive Interview With Filmmaker Henry Jaglom on Editing and the Digital Revolution

Once upon a time, long long ago—but, on the other hand, not really long ago at all—there existed an extraordinary, well-oiled machine. Created by the finest hands in all the land of Germany and ultimately an invention of great luster and beauty, the wondrous well-oiled machine was dubbed the Keller-Elektro-Mechanik Flatbed, and those who grew to know it and love it called it the Kem. This well-oiled machine turned a world on its ear and made the lives of those who used it all the easier. It swept all lands, impressing artisans known and unknown with the exhilarating quality of its facility. One day, however, great wizards from the yonderland of the Valley of Silicon fashioned a grease-lightning fast well-oiled machine that began sweeping the land, usurping the quickness, luster and beauty of the once-great Kem. Once again, the world was turned on its ear.















Okay, so not so much of a fairy-tale. My apologies for the botched conceit. Nevertheless, the truth of the matter at hand is still in there. The Kem, this so-called well-oiled machine, really did turn the world of film editing on its ear when filmmakers began using it in the late 1960's in larger and larger volume. The Kem one-upped the Moviola, more or less trumping all other editing methods with the facility of its use—and when computer software became increasingly sophisticated, the well-oiled machine that was once so super-sophisticated went the way of the dodo. Despite this, there were still those who remained admirably committed, contriving to hang on for as long as they feasibly could. One of these filmmakers, and perhaps the last one to completely let go, is the one who many cineastes would call the independent’s independent, writer-director Henry Jaglom, who is very much like a well-oiled machine himself (considering the fact that he is working on five projects simultaneously).

Prodigious and prolific are two words that leap to mind when you consider Henry, and these are two of the qualities I personally admire most about him. He is currently hard at work promoting his latest release Irene in Time, editing his upcoming film Queen of the Lot (a sequel to 2006’s Hollywood Dreams), producing and seeing to the editing of the filmed version of his play Always But Not Forever (adapted from his 1985 film), writing and re-writing a new play entitled Just 45 Minutes from Broadway and planning to shoot his next feature film. Each of these projects star actress Tanna Frederick, who made her debut in his Hollywood Dreams.








I had the privilege of meeting and getting to know Henry personally in 2006 and, even prior to that, we had been e-mail pen pals (beginning in 2004-ish), writing back and forth about films old, new, domestic, foreign, you name it…and, of course, about filmmaking as well. We have continued our correspondence and have known each other for these years now. In the summer of 2008, I was given the unique opportunity in being invited into Henry’s editing room to watch him work on his latest film. Immediately, what struck me as I entered the editing room was, “Okay, where ya hidin’ the computer here, Henry?” Even though I was aware he still edited on a flatbed, it didn’t really hit me until I walked into an editing room furnished with several celluloid-filled bins and, of course, the well-oiled Kem, complete with pieces of memorabilia hanging on the wall. He switched on his 8-plate Kem and started working diligently on the ending of his film. For a reasonable portion of the day, I watched him physically splice, cut, paste, wind, rewind and do all manner of things to his 35mm film elements—in a sense, watching both well-oiled machines at work. He would present me his guest, and his assistant editor Simone Boudriot with options and versions of the ending, only to, like a brim-hatted jack-rabbit, reposition those elements yet again in an almost lightning-fast way to present us with another version. This was a true sight to see.

Once a close personal friend of Orson Welles, and the last one to hear from him the night before the morning the movie legend died, Henry has carved a more than respectable existence for himself being the independent’s independent. He has never willfully directed a film for the studio system and helms films made his way and his way only. His distribution process is another fascinating aspect of his operation, also running like a well-oiled machine—all in all, a practical (and inspirational) business model for independent filmmaking. His company, Rainbow International Releasing, distributes the Monty Python films here in the United States.












Henry with co-editor Ron Vignone, photo credit: Tanna Frederick

The Jaglom way of working is a very singular way of working in that, ostensibly much the way Cassavetes made films, everything is written in detail beforehand and then, when shooting, the actors will take the reins and fulfill the intentions of the written scenes without adhering so strictly to anything written prior. He then, alone as writer, director and editor, finds the film in the editing room. It was with this knowledge that I was curious to see how Henry coped with having to switch to editing on a computer after decades of working on a flatbed and being initially resistant to the prospect of working any other way. Also, for the first time ever, he is working on Final Cut Pro not just with himself but also with a co-editor, filmmaker Ron Vignone (director of Say I Do and the upcoming documentary The Back Nine).

When I asked Vignone recently how Henry was enjoying working for the first time on Final Cut Pro, his response was simply, "Dan, he's loving it! He's having a blast!" Needless to say, I was quite surprised and started asking Ron more questions. So, eventually, I decided to schedule an interview with Henry to explore this subject. I found myself quite curious to hear what he had to say about the digital revolution and how it has affected his workflow as someone long-acclimated to a certain way of working.

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DK: Let’s start simple and point-blank. It would seem you’ve been resistant to personally using computer editing systems since their inception. What ultimately led to the decision to change over?

HJ: You know, I remember when I was in London shooting Déjà Vu, [Monty Python alumnus] Terry Jones took me in to edit something with him. He showed me how computer editing was done and assured me that I'd love it. My feeling then was that I never would, because I couldn't learn the technology and would somehow miss my whole laborious process—and I am amazed in working with Ron Vignone to say that this is not at all the case. Watching Ron edit a movie version of what he filmed of my play Always But Not Forever was really revelatory. I know it wouldn't have worked without someone who can do it as amazingly well as Ron can, who is wonderfully skilled and inventive and who has very similar tastes to my own, which is easy for me. And you know personally how difficult I can be on occasion and to be around all the time, particularly in the editing room. Ron is quite simply, really brilliant as an editor, yet open to my needs and my specific, idiosyncratic creative energy. So far I haven't been tempted to edit a single thing on my own though I had an important and complex dinner scene transferred to 35mm so that I could work on it while he was doing other stuff yet haven't ever sat down at my editing table where the spools are still left on it to do a single cut myself. I thought this would be a big adjustment, but it really wasn’t. I now wish I had actually listened to Terry Jones back in — what was it — '95 maybe.

DK: Can you talk about having been among the first filmmakers to have used the Kem for editing?

HJ: Orson absolutely insisted that I use it. He told me then that editors would resist the Kem because it was so simple to use that filmmakers would learn how to do it themselves and would not want the editors to come in and edit in their place, and he was right. He always said, and I agree, that filmmakers and directors should edit their films themselves. You really and truly gain an intimacy with the material that you almost always lose when someone else comes in to do it in your place. To me, it's like a painter calling someone in and telling him what colors to use on the canvas. In 1971, on my first film, when the editor assigned to me by BBS Productions for my film A Safe Place [with Tuesday Weld, Jack Nicholson and Orson Welles] fell asleep one day under some drug influence, I took over and found that I really loved editing and that it was essential for me, and no one else, to do it in the future.

DK: So this guy who they hired to edit really fell asleep under the influence while at the actual editing table? Doesn’t sound like a very productive working relationship.

HJ: I remember his name was Howard Awk or Alk, he was famous at the time in certain hip circles for having made or edited a film with Bob Dylan. He was a friend of Dylan's, a graduate of the Second City and had been hired by Bert, from whom I had gotten the Kem. He got high, it seemed, a lot. So it was just when this guy fell asleep at the Kem a couple of times that I decided that he was no-go, and then somehow I convinced Bert [Schneider] to let edit it myself, and so I hand-edited my next—what was it?—14 or 15 films.
And it seemed to me that, with my way of working and not having each scene shot over and over again with different coverage and different angles and whatnot, and with so much improvisation, no one else could possibly put it together except me. In all reality, I write my films in the editing room. I always go into a project with a script, but it is never ever used verbatim, so the actors fulfill the intentions of the written scene without my imposing any rigid directions on them. Then, later in the editing room, I in a sense rewrite the scene with the emotional reality that the actors give me. So with that in mind, the fact that I am finding the movie in the editing process is the reason that I was the only one who could edit my films.

DK: I agree. It is your process, and that's just it.

HJ: I also remember when I was directing A Safe Place, we were shooting a scene and I was telling them what shot I wanted, and everyone in the camera department and continuity kept on telling me, "You can't do that! It's not gonna cut!" And I kept trying to convince them that it would, and it got to the point where I became so frustrated, I went over to Orson, kvetched a bit and asked his advice. He told me, "Tell them it's a dream sequence." At first, I was confused because it wasn't a dream sequence, but he told me that if you told people you were shooting a dream sequence, they would put aside any resistance towards your wishes and that they would do whatever you want. So I went back and told the cameraman that it was a dream sequence we were shooting, and he told me, "Well, why didn't you say so? I can put the camera over here and do all kinds of crazy things." [laughing] So, basically, no one else could see the vision I had for the edited product, so that was just more evidence that I was the only one who could do it.



DK: You’re working very closely with a co-editor, Ron Vignone, for the first time. How would you describe that working dynamic, considering the fact that you edited your own films by yourself from the beginning of your career?

HJ: It’s been easy and terrific! Ron knows all my work and my taste so well. He was always at my side during the writing of Queen of the Lot and during the whole shooting of it as well. Seeing Ron do what he did on Always convinced me to try this new system out, and working with him on that scene at the end of Irene in Time further convinced me, and now I am completely sold and spoiled, letting him do all the complex first roughs while I finish re-writes on my new play and work on my Jewish history book. If it weren't for Ron, I'd be sitting at my Kem for endless hours, going over to the shelves to take out reel after endless reel, putting each one on my flatbed and looking, cutting, rewinding, looking, cutting, rewinding, looking, cutting...for hundreds of hours.

DK: What have you learned about yourself and about your process as a result of this shift, and your adoption of using new filmmaking technology, if anything? Have you also learned anything about your process from working with a co-editor for the first time? Did anything surprise you?

HJ: I really haven’t learned much directly as a result of the change of process. I was definitely quite surprised at how much faster it is, and how much easier.

DK: I recall years ago now how you marveled at watching a two-minute short film of mine online, and your telling me how lucky I was to be coming of age as a filmmaker in the age of the Internet, when distribution was easy and turnaround time was so fast. Do you wish that you yourself had come of age as a filmmaker during the digital filmmaking revolution considering its advantages in the realm of production and distribution?

HJ: No, not at all. I like everything having been exactly as it was, and I've never wished retroactively for things to have been different. That is science fiction and it doesn't interest me, nor do I find it constructive to think about how things could have been different, because each film I have made is a perfect representation of who I was at the time it was made. So how could I possibly want it to be any other way?

DK: On a very general basis, what do you think of the phenomenon—that Joe Schmo from Oatmeal, Nebraska can access a digital camera very easily, pick it up and make a film on his own with very little resources and very little money? The digital revolution has furthered opened the door to regional filmmaking, which excites me as a filmmaker. However, do you think this new accessibility has opened the flood-gates for products of a decidedly lesser quality? How does that make you feel as a filmmaker?

HJ: I am happy for everyone who now gets a chance who wouldn't have in the past. I think this is really and truly great. It’s the best thing that could have happened, and I am not really at all concerned with a perceived loss of collective quality of work.

DK: Were you initially amazed at the immediate results inherent in computer editing (e.g. that you can color correct without going to a chemical color-timer or that you can fade, mix audio, dissolve or superimpose titles onto images without optical printing)? Were there any other surprising revelations that you discovered when you chose to adapt to the new technology?

HJ: No real surprise there. I did know all this, but who doesn’t know this? It’s so out there now, it seems like. That's what is so amazing!

DK: Considering the way you work and your artistic process, have you found it easier or more difficult to edit improvised scenes with the new system?

HJ: Both really. I remember Orson watching me edit improvisational acting one day when I was putting together Can She Bake a Cherry Pie?, him sitting behind me and smoking his Monte Cristo and being utterly fascinated as I made it up as I went along, amazed when I took a bit of someone's dialogue out of one mouth and put it in another, or taking just syllables here and words there and as a result re-writing whole scenes, changing whole sentences and making several actors look as if they were saying things that they never actually said. But I am enjoying watching Ron edit the scenes and then showing it to me and then working on it with him, and so on, like I guess more traditional directors do, and the speed with which all this can be done amazes and delights me, what would have taken me weeks can be done in one sitting. It's liberating.

DK: To quote your mentor Orson Welles, “I believe it is possible to spoil a young filmmaker with too much privilege, too much money and too much comfort so that he does not learn one of the main arts of directing, which is the ability to walk away from something.” Do you think that it is in turn possible to spoil young filmmakers with the advantages of the digital format?

HJ: I don't know where you got this quote, but Orson said thousands of things, whatever came to his mind at the moment he said, and never seriously thought about this. Don't take what you read seriously, people say all sorts of things. And I don't believe something like this can spoil a young filmmaker. Quite the contrary, it opens up the form for people. I have always encouraged the growth of digital filmmaking for all it allows young and beginning filmmakers, but have just never been interested in working within it myself, until now.

DK: I know a few people who feel that way, that computer editing spoils you to the point where you can't think and consider fully what you're doing because it is so fast that you want to do it and the next minute, it's done...no extended thought process that one would get from winding, cutting, splicing, watching.

HJ: I do understand what you're saying. I just think that the more open the medium and the form is, the more interesting the results are ultimately going to be.

DK: In any case, do you see your beginning to use editing software as a gateway for you to in the future shoot digitally on HD, or are you faithfully committed in sickness or health to shooting in 35mm?

HJ: I really have no commitment to anything like that now. But who knows? It could go either way, I don't know yet. At various points throughout my editing process, I screen the films in rough cut form. I would always have to take the work-print to the lab and get it transferred at various stages to a DVD. Another perk is that this new process cuts down on that expense as well, and you can make DVDs at various points without that hassle. So the more I am seeing the various perks of doing things digitally, the more I become open to further changes.

DK: Does 35mm editing still have any advantages over digital editing?

HJ: One thing I can say is that I no longer feel like an artisan, like I used to—the feeling of what it is to work with your hands. One of the best things about working in film on a Kem and on any flatbed is feeling the film between your fingers on the editing table and watching light pass through the actual elements when you’re editing. There’s just nothing like it. So, if there is anything I miss, it is that. I am not so sure you can feel anything even akin to that when you edit on a computer. It's just very different.

DK: On a lighter note, I remember you saying that you intended to make a film for every letter of the alphabet (i.e. A for Always But Not Forever, B for Babyfever, C for Can She Bake a Cherry Pie? , D for Déjà Vu, E for Eating, F for Festival in Cannes, etc). Is this still a goal and do you think the quickness of computer editing can facilitate that goal?

HJ: [laughing] Yes, it’s still a goal…if I live long enough to see to it. Editing on a computer is quick, so we shall see.

DK: A great teacher of mine once said, “If one studies history, one should begin at the beginning. Therefore, filmmakers just starting out should learn how to shoot on film elements before moving onto video in order to understand the roots of filmmaking.” Do you think fledgling filmmakers should first, or at some point, learn how to shoot and edit on film with a flatbed to understand from hence and whence we came?

HJ: There are no rules, and I believe anyone who preaches rules is missing something really valuable. Everyone is different and should approach making films in any way he or she thinks is best, most importantly no one should listen to anyone else who tells them that there is a right and wrong way to do things....just do them and don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t. That is the best advice I can give...to not let anyone tell you, "No, you can't." And the digital age makes that more possible for people, in my belief. I've made a career out of telling people, "Yes I can!" If I can make that "Yes I can" happen from editing on 35mm, they can make it happen with the new ways made available!

IRENE IN TIME is playing at Laemmle's Sunset 5 Theater in Los Angeles. Henry's play JUST 45 MINUTES FROM BROADWAY premieres at Edgemar Center on October 1.